Lee Min-ho

(On TV, January 2021) It’s easy to dismiss Hollywood big-budget action comedies as easy movies to make, catering to the common denominator and letting action sequences make up the plot. But it’s not all that easy to do them well, as countless filmmakers eventually discover when they’re entrusted with besting Hollywood at their own game. Case in point: Chinese copycat Bounty Hunters, which ticks off all the right boxes on paper: A fast, fun action comedy featuring five attractive leads, nearly a dozen action sequences, some big-budget mayhem, plenty of digital special effects, bright cinematography and a breezy pace. At 105 minutes, it shouldn’t overstay its welcome while still having time to develop a moderately interesting intrigue. In terms of tone, the film does whatever it can to avoid the violent excesses of its American counterparts: the five bounty hunters only carry non-lethal weaponry, and while the villain makes plenty of credible threats, there’s never any fear that anything bad will happen to our leads. Lee Min-ho and Tiffany Tang make a good lead couple, although they have far less on-screen personality than their comic foils, played by Wallace Chung and Karena Ng, with Louis Fan rounding up the protagonists. At times, Bounty Hunters works really well when it gets to the mechanics of an action sequence. But the rest of the time, it’s a clunky film: the pacing is completely off, either slow enough to smother the film’s energy, or so fast that crucial bits leading from one scene to another are missing. The too-cute moments feel awkward, and the film as a whole does not have the smooth forward rhythm that action comedies must have in order to remain watchable. The jokes are hit-and-miss (even accounting for the cultural differences) and the contrivances are such that some action sequences become completely meaningless before they even conclude. It makes for a disappointing experience: Despite Bounty Hunter’s adequate production values and directorial ambitions from Terra Shin, the film trips over its own editing and suffers from a lack of polish that would have tied all of its good elements together. After all, it’s not as easy as one would think to ape what Hollywood does best.